Wasted Pages

Do you know where nightmares come from? I didn’t either until I got the job of state psychiatrist. My name, if it is important, is Albert Boxer. I would like to believe I’m one of those go getters. It was never my plan to become a psychiatrist. I wanted to be a superhero or a space captain. I grew up in a small town, raising chickens and planting a garden, sweating in the summer heat and dancing with fairies in the cool summer night. My best memory of James is running through the twilight, playing hide and seek, hiding in the tall weeds, wondering when James would find me and I would be it, worrying that boogie man would get me. Boogie man. What a laugh. It wasn’t until later when James and I were teens that I got the scary call from him needing my help. He was down at the old bridge, sitting on the edge, almost hidden by the grapevines that clung to the decaying wood. The rope still dangled from one of the bridge supports, waiting for some lithe kid to grab hold and swing out over the swimming hole. But James wasn’t swimming that night. He was freaking out from taking LSD. I didn’t find out until later that his new ‘friends’ were testing how many tabs a person could take before he lost it.